ABOUT

The first Seeling Night story was written in the summer of 2006 as a submission for Staff Infection, a collection of art, essays, and short stories contributed by the staff at Cody’s Books in Berkeley, California. The story did not make the submission deadline, but the editor promised to include it in the fall edition. Before that issue was compiled, Cody’s Books went through an extensive restructuring in an ultimately failed attempt to save the business.

The story, “The Collector” was inspired by a newspaper clipping describing an Oakland resident who discovered a human skull in her walls while remodeling her home. Many of the elements of the future Seeling Night stories were present in this first effort: Cabal, the waspish antiquarian book collector, the reclusive Edward Hare, and Hare’s Books, the dusty and cramped bookstore where many stories would take place. 

The author created a website for the now half-dozen stories about Cabal and his encounters with supernatural evil. In trying to find a name for that first website he remembered a quote from the Scottish Play that fit the macabre spirit of things:

Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day; And with thy bloody and invisible hand, Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow Makes wing to the rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, While night's black agents to their preys do rouse.

A self-published collection of short stories Seeling Night: A Psychomanteum followed in 2017. It included that story written for Staff Infection,more than a decade after missing a deadline.